Various technologies employ techniques that forward a high-speed serial data signal from one integrated circuit to another integrated circuit. One example of such technologies is semiconductor memory technology. Some semiconductor memory systems couple a plurality of memory chips with each other and forward a high-speed serial data signal from one memory chip to the other so as to accomplish read or write operations. In this respect, some semiconductor memory systems use two different data propagation modes for forwarding a serial data signal from one memory chip to the other: a transparent mode and a resample mode.
In the transparent mode, the serial data signal is received at a data input of the memory chip and transmitted via a transparent data path to a data output of the memory chip. In the resample mode, the serial data signal is received at the data input and transmitted via a resample path to the data output. In the resample path, the serial data signal is parallelized and then the parallelized data signal is sampled. The sampled parallelized signal is then reserialized and transmitted to the data output. The transparent data path provides no parallelization and no sampling of the data signal. The transparent data path thus offers a reduced latency as compared to the resample data path. As compared to the transparent data path, the resample data path offers an improved quality of the serial data signal at the data output of the memory chip. In this type of semiconductor memory system, there is a limitation on the speed of the serial data signal transmitted between the memory chips and on the number of memory chips (also referred to as ranks) which can be connected in series.
For these and other reasons, there is a need for the present invention.